POV: tress
Summary
The first cannonball tears through the far wall of the hold, sails across, and shatters against the opposite side in a spray of wet ceramic and metal beads. Tress hears scrambling boots and screaming sailors on the deck above. She shouts to the rat, who has flattened himself into a corner of his cage, asking what he can see. Through his light hole he reports one other ship, no flag visible. Pirates would not fire without demanding surrender, he says; whoever this is must be a royal ship that found out the Oot's Dream is a smuggler and is dealing with the matter the civilised way.
The new hole in the hull is large enough to spill spores into the hold every time the ship rolls. Tress watches a green tide creep toward her cage. Some of the spores grey out on the silvered deck and die, but plenty of live ones keep coming. The narrator pauses to lecture: spores are heavier than dust, more like fine sand, so they do not hang in the air without a strong breeze. Tress pulls her shirt up over her mouth and nose anyway and watches.
The spores are flowing toward the shattered cannonball and the water it sprayed across the wall. When the first live spore touches water, Tress gets her first close look at spore-sea warfare. A burst of vines explodes into existence — the narrator likens it to lightning made of vines — and within seconds a snarled tree ten feet tall has grown in the hold, roots cracking the planks, branches bowing the deck. Tress cannot help imagining what the same reaction would do inside her own mouth, and the narrator obliges with a clinical paragraph: jaws forced apart, vines down the throat and into the lungs, teeth knocked out, sinuses drilled through, eyes ripped from their sockets, and the small mercy of suffocating before the vines quite reach the brain.
A sailor stumbles down the steps in a cloth mask, carrying a lantern and an odd device the size of a small box — a splintbox, which the narrator slips in is exactly the right size to carry a human head. He holds it against the hole in the hull, pours a few drops of water into the top, and a translucent reddish-pink sheet grows out the front of the box, fusing itself to the surrounding wood. He cuts the sheet off with a silver knife. Tress recognises the substance — roseite, grown from the pink-red spores of the Rose Sea over on the next moon, where the sea is inhabited and the spores are reckoned somewhat less lethal than those of the Crimson or Midnight. She is staggered. Spores could be used. For *practical purposes*. The narrator notes that her crash course in naval warfare has just been overtaken by an even more startling one in utilitarian economics.
The sprouter unslings a pole tipped with a silver plate and waves it across the floor; the loose spores go grey at its touch. He gives the vine tree a glance, decides it is not worth fighting just yet, and heads for the steps. The narrator explains in passing that every ship of Tress's world keeps at least one sailor trained to handle and use spores — a sprouter.
Tress grabs the bars and calls after him. If the attackers are firing instead of demanding ransom, she argues, they must be a royal ship out to exterminate the smugglers — and a royal ship would not knowingly fire on a vessel carrying a royal inspector. He snarls back that she will go down with the rest of them, makes the local rude gesture (which on this world involves flicking the fingers as if flinging water), and only then catches her meaning. He stares at her for a long moment, then scrambles for the keys.